Hyping a Slow-Paced Pastime : Chess Boosters Bank on New ‘King’ to Lift Image

The world champion hunched forward as the challenger launched his attack.

The crowd, as usual, was silent.

Time crept by. The champ fidgeted briefly, then scratched his head as two expert commentators, analyzing the encounter for spectators from a nearby room via closed-circuit television, exchanged banter.

“Well, the champion has now been thinking for 20 minutes, Dan. What are your thoughts?” one of the experts asked his bearded partner.

“The game is in danger of fizzling out,” Dan responded, “but not for another hour or two.”

Ninety minutes later, events proved Dan right, and the ninth of the 24-game World Chess Championship match between two Soviet grandmasters, champion Gary Kasparov and challenger Anatoly Karpov, ended in an uninspiring draw. Their 10th game Saturday also ended in a draw.

Even at world championship level, the complexity of chess, its slow pace and lack of action would seem to make it the unlikeliest of pastimes to attract widespread public interest.

But ever since a controversial American high school dropout named Bobby Fischer broke the long Soviet domination of the game 14 years ago and won the world title with an irrepressible mixture of genius and flamboyance, chess has gradually generated heightened public interest in the West.

It is an interest that Western promoters of the game hope to build on, boosting media interest, sponsorship and prize money.

“We need media coverage for chess to take off in the United States,” said Eric Schiller, an American international player and chief spokesman for the championship match being played here. “TV can do for chess what it did for tennis.”

Growing Interest

Although still modest by the standards of most sporting events, that interest has steadily grown, fueled mainly by a series of colorful characters who have transformed the movement of pawns, bishops and other pieces around the chess board into a struggle between good and evil that those who know little of the game can relate to.

Take the current championship. The brilliant, unpredictable, 23-year-old champion Kasparov, has a style and flair somehow reminiscent of Joe Namath, a taste for flashy Western suits, a Russian movie-star girlfriend and a penchant for voicing his opinions that makes Soviet officialdom cringe.

“He’s got charisma,” said Maxim Dlugy, one of 22 Americans who have attained the game’s highest title, grandmaster.

In the West, Kasparov is the hero. At the chessboard, he does not squeeze out tactical advantage, say chess experts. Instead, he gambles and goes for the jugular at the slightest hint of weakness from his opponent.

He exudes energy and once destroyed a Hungarian opponent psychologically by prowling around the stage between moves in a black leather jacket.

Brilliance and Luck

His uninhibited, sometimes reckless, play combined with brilliance and luck have given Kasparov a slim advantage of 5 1/2 points to 4 1/2 in the championship match after 10 games. The scheduled 24-game match will move to Leningrad for the final 12 games.

Challenger Karpov, 35, the man Kasparov dethroned last year after one of the most controversial championship series in a century, could not be more different.

He is a colorless plodder, whose chess resembles the style of a boring base-line tennis player, the experts say. He wins by making fewer mistakes rather than by imaginative play.

For free-time excitement, he collects stamps.

Karpov won the world title by default in 1975 when Fischer refused to defend it after the terms and conditions he demanded for the match could not be met.

600 Journalists

The current match, the third championship contest between Kasparov and Karpov, has attracted about 600 journalists, including the major American television networks. It has inspired modest, but important, television coverage, and it even drew British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to the opening game.

Tickets, costing from $4.50 to $30, have been sold out at all 10 matches so far, and organizers have done a brisk business in T-shirts, umbrellas and sweat shirts emblazoned with the World Chess Championship logo.

But the growth of interest, both in the Kasparov-Karpov rivalry and in the game of chess, is best reflected by the record $920,000 prize money raised by the London organizers.

Both players have pledged to donate their share to a fund established for the victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

‘Brilliancy Prize’

Although the bulk of the prize money was provided by a London municipal government grant, commercial companies are also linked to the event in greater numbers than ever before.

The Save & Prosper Group, a London-based life insurance and mutual fund company, has put up a $15,000 “brilliancy prize” for the best game of the match, while the Wimpy fast-food chain has subsidized the admission price for pensioners, unemployed people and children.

American Express is the match’s official travel agent, and Apple Computers has lent computer hardware.

“We think there’s an interest in chess among young people, and kids are an important target area for us,” explained Judith Burdon, marketing manager for Wimpy in Britain.

Russians Dominate Game

Television coverage by both British networks (and other Western outlets, including the Public Broadcasting System in the United States), has gratified commercial sponsors but created the incongruous picture of two Soviet masters playing studiously against a backdrop of capitalist advertising posters.

Although chess probably originated in India or China about 1,400 years ago, Russians have dominated international competition for much of the last century.

In the Soviet Union, chess is a national pastime--part culture, part sport--pursued in clubs and formal competitions by an estimated 3 million players.

World championships are traditionally followed as avidly in the depths of the Kremlin as by the man in the street, and a Soviet commentator transmits animated game reports daily for Soviet television.

Acute Identity Crisis

When Karpov first won his world title in 1975, he was congratulated by the then-Soviet leader, Leonid I. Brezhnev, in much the same spirit as American football or baseball champions receive congratulatory calls from the White House.

Chess is also followed avidly in Yugoslavia, Hungary and Bulgaria.

By contrast, those who take chess seriously claim that it suffers from an acute identity crisis in the West.

“The media doesn’t know how to deal with it,” Schiller said. “In many (Western) countries, it’s treated as a sport. Here (in Britain) it is handled as domestic news. In the U.S., chess news gets passed from editor to editor and usually ends up in the leisure section.”

In the United States, about 50,000 players pursue the game actively, according to International Chess Federation figures.

‘A Helluva Fight’

For chess enthusiasts, it is both a release and a challenge.

“It is a way of getting away from the world entirely to a set of problems confined to a small board,” said Allen Kaufman, executive director of the American Chess Foundation. “It’s pure, theoretical, artistic, creative and a helluva fight that happens to be intellectual rather than physical.”

In the present championship rivalry, Karpov supporters have had little to cheer about.

Two years ago in Moscow, Karpov, then a confident champion, appeared at one point to be on the verge of demolishing his brash, upstart challenger. He led 5 to 0, needing only a sixth victory to retain his title under championship match rules then in effect, which assigned no points for draws and awarded the match to the first contestant to win six games, however long that might take.

Then Kasparov adopted a new strategy, deciding to try to demoralize his opponent by deliberately playing for draws. Twenty-one games and three months later, Kasparov broke through, winning his first game.

Exhaustion Set In

The champion’s confidence drained, exhaustion set in and the indefatigable Kasparov moved in for the kill. But after two more Kasparov victories had left Karpov reeling, President Florencio Campomanes of the International Chess Federation, a Filipino, stepped in dramatically and inexplicably to stop the contest in February, 1985, after a record 48 games in five months of play.

Kasparov cried foul. Others charged that Campomanes was prompted to act by Soviet chess officials, who preferred the predictable and tractable Karpov to his flamboyant, unpredictable opponent. The chess world, not lacking in opinioned individualists, went into an uproar.

It calmed slightly after Kasparov won the title 13-11 in last fall’s rematch in Moscow, which was played under revised rules that also apply to their current contest. Twenty-four games are played, with contestants scoring a full point for each win and a half-point for each draw. Victory goes to the first player to win six games or score 12 1/2 points. In the event of a 12-12 tie Kasparov retains his title.

Karpov Better Prepared

In this, their third world championship encounter, experts tend to agree that Karpov is better prepared but that Kasparov’s unnerving arrogance and high-risk tactics have given him the edge.

Kasparov’s aggression has forced even the cautious Karpov into the occasional gamble.

Although Game 9 was uninspiring, the previous three were described by the chief London organizer and British grandmaster, Ray Keene, as “sharp, bloody contests.”

But the stakes of the Karpov-Kasparov clash go far beyond the world title and the prize money: A long-reigning champion is a powerful man who can exert his will on the structure and the image of world chess.

Those in the West hoping to promote the game commercially are rooting heavily for Kasparov.

‘We Need a Personality’

“We need a personality, and Kasparov may be that personality,” Dlugy said.

A Kasparov victory could also make the champion a formidable enemy to the enigmatic Campomanes as he seeks reelection to the international federation’s top post in November. Lincoln Lucena, a Brazilian university professor backed by many top players, is challenging Campomanes on a platform of heightening the game’s profile.

Lucena is an unabashed advocate of commercial promotion, who pledges that his first task will be to try to entice Fischer out of retirement.

“We’re hoping for radical change,” Schiller said.